Police body cams should be live-streamed. No argument. Full stop.

There has always been closely guarded and understandable resistance on the part of law enforcement to opening our profession to the public eye. It’s been a long standing tenet that what we do in public should be held close to the profession. The thought is that what the public wants to know should be filtered through a ìneed to know” screen.

We used to believe that law enforcement was only really understood by us cops. We believed we were the final arbiters and interpreters of events, especially those of great public interest or controversy.

That public policy is still the modus operandi. Unfortunately, it’s a presumption that prosecutors and the courts–the other major components of the criminal justice system– share and support. It’s outdated.

There was a time when the criminal justice system called the shots from crime to conviction–the where and when the flow of information to the public was controlled and calculated. The story was told and interpreted through the words and action of a system with a vested interest in protecting an image, and in fairness a concern for public servants. That doesn’t mean there was an unjust intent. It’s
just the way it was.

But now, the playing field, the equipment and the rules have all changed. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the police’s badly out-positioned playbook. And it’s the
police and their relationships in individual communities which now finds the profession mired in a lack public confidence and trust.

Social Media Fallout

The unrelenting onslaught of the use of social media and a profession poorly-prepared to deal with its result will continue to erode both confidence and trust in the cops.

Now, the story of the street isn’t told first by those who are quick on the draw with guns, but with the adept use of online audio and video. The story may or may not give an accurate picture as events unfold, but without argument, that becomes the ‘truth’ until it’s undone later by the facts of the event. In the meantime, and in real time, the damage is done and the ‘truth’ as told in the moment is embedded in the public eye and public consciousness. It’s not fair. Rarely is.

Police administrations across this country and political ‘leadership’ get blamed for the imagined offenses.

The criminal justice system is then ordered to ‘fix it.’

It’s time for the street cops to get back their reputations. To do that, they should just let the cameras roll. Real time. Real story. Let ’em go.

Police body cameras are only a half a decade from becoming a legislated mandate in many states in the country. It’s futile for police to believe that the outcry
for that technology as a tool in their everyday lives will somehow be a passing fad. Flatly, that will not happen.

The ubiquitous nature of street cop cams will eventually result in judges requiring them for evidence.

Excuses like bad batteries and poor lighting and ìI forgot to turn it onî will either become cause for unfavorable jury instructions, or prosecutors will be told by courts to dismiss the case for the lack of best evidence.

Go Live 24-7

But that is not enough. It’s time for a police departments with enlightened management, and a high degree of faith in the accountability of their supervisory structure, to take body cameras live and unedited to the street.

From roll call to end-of-shift letís go live everyday. Every moment. Every stop. Every call for help. Letís go tell our story in real time, streaming information to the public who wants us to be right and to support us.

Thatís right, a reality show like none other. It’s what the public pays for and it is what they admire about what we do. It’s also what they criticize but still support.

And here’s why. Prosecutors, defense counsel and courts would be in hysterics over such a proposal.

The idea that the cops would move to a live streaming relationship with the community as they deal with matters yet to be adjudicated and without the ìguiding touchî of the rest of the system is, well, to say the least, heresy.

It removes the blindfold from the figure holding the scales of justice and how can that possibly work?

But riddle me this. When the streets are burning in North Carolina,or Baton Rouge or Baltimore and the cops are taking incoming spit,rocks and bottles. When they’re being cursed in New York or assassinated in Dallas… where is the rest of the criminal justice system to support their image and protecting their lives and careers?

This will be a painful move for the police. In moving forward this way by informing the public in real time, there will be some individual casualties. What makes it worth the switch is that the public will learn truthful and timely information about the true value of quality policing.

And, can you imagine getting to watch on YouTube,Twitter, etc., the daily humdrum live-stream of one police officer helping a kid with a flat tire on a bike a ride home or giving a jump for someone with a dead battery? Soon, reality police shows would be old news.

But there’s a more important reason to bring policing live to social media. It will force the profession to fast-forward on the policy changes it needs to make to better hire, train,and hold accountable a new generation of police officers,deputies, and troopers.

This coming generation is well equipped and internally hardwired todeal with the realities of modern technology and the instant-information age that cops operate in every day.

Right now, this next generation of our protectors is at a great disadvantage. They’re just waiting for a better grade of police administrations and political leaders to give them the tools they need to win the image battle.

Let’s just cut to the chase and go live, 24-7, and let the average American see what the average cop sees live and in real time.

Bernie Giusto is a former Lieutenant and Public Information Officer for the Oregon State Police, Chief of the Gresham Oregon Police Department and Multnomah County Sheriff.

“US MARINE SHOT IN SOUTH LA WHILE ON MILITARY LEAVE DIES”

“The 19-year-old U.S. Marine who was shot in the head while on military leave in South L.A. last week has died, officials said.”

So reads the headline and lead sentence of the ABC news report of September 20, 2016, on the death of Carlos Segovia, U.S. Marine Corps, only 19 years old.

Marine Segovia, was not shot down in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other foreign terrorist war zone in the heat of battle with foreign enemies of America. He was murdered in cold blood on the streets of So. Central Los Angeles, apparently by urban thugs or gangsters, domestic enemies of America, terrorizing communities and turning urban areas like So. Central LA into domestic war zones with mounting death tolls.

According to police, Marine Segovia, while home on leave from Camp Pendleton, was shot in the head, twice, on Sept. 16, 2016, at approximately 11:30 p.m., as he sat behind the wheel of his car waiting for a traffic light to change at 31st and Washington streets in So. Central L.A . The shots came from the car next to him, which apparently drove off when the light changed. Four days later, Marine Segovia was declared dead on Sept. 20, 2016. As of this writing, the murderers remain at large to continue on their murderous way, once again killing with impunity.

This is apparently the new norm of “America transformed” under Barack Hussein Obama. Life is now that cheap and dangerous, and death so random, in L.A. and other American cities, even the life of a Marine who is living his life in service to America.

It is so much the new norm that, outside of local media reporting, the death, the wanton murder, of U.S. Marine Carlos Segovia in So. Central L.A. has not been deemed “news worthy” enough by the media to be the subject of national news media reportage, nor media demands for action to stop such murders. The “talking heads” of television political punditry are not talking about the outrage of a Marine being cold bloodily murdered in So. Central L.A. There is no media outrage.

But, the most important question is not about just the failure of outrage or even concern over the murder of Marine Carlos Segovia by the political whores of the liberal national media who are so willingly pimped by progressive liberals in political power from the White House on down. The most important question to be asked is:

Where is Obama, Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Lynch, the Democrats most beloved Vietnam draft dodger, sexual predator, disbarred lawyer (for perjury) and Impeached President Bill (“BJ”) Clinton, California Governor Jerry Brown, LA Mayor Garcetti, progressive liberal Democrats all, to denounce as an outrage the murder on South L.A. streets of a Marine home on leave, to pledge and take action to search out the murderers, and to vigorously prosecute the killers of this Marine?

After eight years of ruling-by-race of the Obama regime, eight years of unequal enforcement or non-enforcement of the law based on race, eight years of refusal to act against urban gangsterism and thuggism and instead to appease, coddle, and make excuses for preening urban terrorist thugs who have no fear of prosecution and burn, loot, rob, rape and murder with apparent impunity, American urban streets are no longer safe, even for Marines.

Even the murder of a U.S. Marine home on leave draws no immediate expression of outrage from the progressive liberal Obama regime in Washington or the progressive liberal regime of Jerry Brown in Sacramento. There are no “executive” or other orders to finally take effective action against self-proclaimed urban terrorist gangster thugs from the government whose primary job is to keep Americans safe, at which Obama has been and is an abject failed President and Commander-In-Chief.

Obama, the Narcissist-In-Chief, the Peacock President, preened before his election in 2008 that “we are the ones we have been waiting for,” and that he and they would “fundamentally transform” America.

Indeed, he and they are the “ones [they] have been waiting for” and he and they have “fundamentally transform[ed] America: The streets of major American cities are now of “third world” danger under a corrupt government, where even a Marine home on leave can be murdered without a peep of protest from the same President Obama and Would-be President Hillary Clinton who are so quick to condemn our police, or our military if they should commit an act of political incorrectness even in war, and to condemn “white” American patriots generally as “racists,” “bigots,” or “deplorables.”

The names of thugs whose own misconduct has resulted in them being shot by police are now household names. They are made famous, rather than infamous. They are made “victims” of “police racism” rather than racist urban thugs terrorizing their communities, perpetrators not victims of crimes, whose deaths are decried as “racism” by police and whites generally.

The President of the United States aids-and-abets them, excuses their misconduct, refuses to hold them equally responsible under the law for their acts. Obama even speculated in one famous case that “if I had a son he would look like” the black alleged victim of a racist, unlawful homicide. Thus, before any evidence was in making an alleged victim of racist violence one who, when the evidence was in, was shown to be the perpetrator of violence who died due to his own violent acts.

Photo Credit: Facebook

More generally, Obama, the purported “post racial” president further infamously observed that non-Harvardonian, Yalean, or other Ivy League-educated white people are just backward, racist, bigots “clinging to their guns and religion.” Not to be outdone, she who would be President, Hillary Clinton, the Hillarybeast of Benghazi, recently informed all of America and the world that those Americans opposing her election are just a “basket of deplorables,” who are “irredeemable.”

Why shouldn’t urban terrorist thugs and gangsters believe they can get away with rioting, burning, looting, beating, knifing, shooting and killing, and murder of a U.S. Marine on American city streets when government in the Age of Obama reassures them constantly they are but victims of racism and not responsible for their own choices and acts, and the media make them famous as “heroes” to other thugs and gangsters by wall-to-wall coverage of their anarchic riots, interviewing them on national television in all their posturing self-glory as they riot, burn, and loot in alleged protest against “racism”?

Why shouldn’t such despicable cretins believe they can with impunity stop at a traffic light, and open fire on the driver of the car next to them, murdering the driver, in this case a U.S. Marine, in an America “fundamentally transform[ed]” after eight years of Obama, and the prospect of more of the same by Hillary Clinton? They are but “victims,” after all, not to be equally held to the same standards of conduct as others.

Here is a name that Obama, Hillary, all of those who are “the ones we [progressive liberals] have been waiting for,” those “fundamentally transform[ing] America, and the media which is pimped by them should make a “household name” known to all Americans, of all races:

CARLOS SEGOVIA, United States Marine, wantonly murdered on the streets of Los Angeles while home on leave from his chosen duty as a U.S. Marine to keep Americans, all Americans, safe from harm from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Dead at 19.

May the God U.S. Marine Carlos Segovia served bless and keep him; may America and the Americans he served as a Marine remember and cherish him. May he not have lived, served, or died in vain.

FOR GOD AND COUNTRY FOREVER; SURRENDER TO TYRANNY—INCLUDING THUG TYRANNY — NEVER!

(Rees Lloyd is a longtime California civil rights lawyer, veterans activist, and a member of the Victoria Taft Blogforce)

Editor’s note: A GoFundMe account has been started to pay for any residual funeral expenses that the USMC stipend does not cover.

“What do we want? Darren Wilson! How do we want him? Dead!”

Nothing is clear in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri except the unarmed, nearly 300 pound teenager is now dead–cut down by a cop’s fusillade of bullets.

After nights of civil unrest followed by a tenuous keeping of the peace, all hell broke loose again last night as cops tried to impose a curfew.

Over at Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft was the first to bring the following video at a rally of the New Black Panthers calling for the murder of Officer Darren Wilson

http://youtu.be/FwJrG2AMghw

But that’s not all. The Feds, already running another investigation into the incident, are demanding they conduct a second autopsy of Brown’s body. The result of the first autopsy as well toxicology testing haven’t been released. That’s right, a week’s worth of protests led by Al Sharpton, The Black Panthers and others have been based solely on the emotional outburst by horrified citizens, the hacktivist group Anonymous, and MSNBC which has been going wall to wall with coverage. That coverage was only momentarily silenced when police released video showing Brown stealing from a convenience store and assaulting the owner.